I'm Already There
by WishingOnMyStar
Summary: This is a Christmas One-shot. It's Christmas Eve and Carlisle is stuck working at the hospital in Rochester, New York...All Human, slight background modification.


**I'm Already There- Carlisle/Esme Fanfiction One-shot**

**By: WishingOnMyStar**

**Disclaimer: I don't own Carlisle (sob) or Esme, nor do I own the lyrics to this song. The song is "I'm Already There" by Lonestar, and Carlisle and Esme belong to the awesome Stephenie Meyer, without whom none of us would spend nearly so much time writing fanfictions!**

**A/N: Happy Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanzaa, and whatever other holiday you may or may not celebrate around this time of year. This is my gift to all you fabulous readers who have been reading and reviewing my fanfictions for the past year! It's been great and you all really helped me grow as a writer, making me more confident about my work and sharing it with others.**

**Thank you to all and please, enjoy!**

**-Wish**

**P.S. I'm posting a YouTube link to this song on my site. I highly recommend listening to it as you read the section with the lyrics. I listened to it almost non-stop as I was writing this.**

***In order for this story to better fit the lyrics, you need to keep a few things in mind. Please, momentarily forget that Carlisle, Esme, and Edward are vampires. In this story, they DO have heartbeats and they DO have dreams. If you're worried about the back story, just keep reading. I try to explain everything.***

Esme sighed tiredly as she put up another ornament on the tree, a little picture frame of her, Carlisle, and Edward at her and Carlisle's wedding. She reached down into the Tupperware container again and her hand brushed one last box. Esme pulled it out of the box, gently unwrapping the newspaper. In her hand she grasped a small, gold star, the tree topper. Esme hesitated, looking down at the star and then to the top of the evergreen tree. The star was always Carlisle's task. He'd placed it at the top of the tree every year for the past five Esme had known him. But Esme was unsure he'd be able to this Christmas. They had just moved to Rochester, New York and it was Carlisle's first Christmas at the hospital. That meant he was working Christmas Eve, the rookie on the staff. But he should be returning in the morning. He should be there to open presents with her and Edward.

Esme placed the star back on its newspaper wrapping and laid it gently on the table. It would be ready for him when he came home. It'd been five years. Five years since her suicide attempt. Five years since she'd swallowed those little pills and closed her eyes, hoping that when she opened them, she'd be in Heaven, holding her baby boy in her arms. But that hadn't been the case. She had opened her eyes and at first, she thought she impossibly _had_ gone to Heaven. Soft rays of morning sun shined down upon her face and as her eyes flickered open, they were met with stunning, sky blue ones and a face that could only be divine.

That had been her first sight of Dr. Carlisle Cullen, the brilliant, young surgeon from London, England. He had asked her how she was feeling and Esme had been caught without words at his soft, gently voice with the hinting London accent. But he had smiled and encouraged her that everything would be alright. He'd saved her life, after she'd selfishly tried to take it.

In the following months, Esme had gotten to know Carlisle better. He'd politely asked her after she had fully recovered and checked out of the hospital if he could take her to dinner. It had been the first of many dates in the best time of Esme's life, despite the pain from the loss of her child and the divorce from her abusive husband, Charles. Carlisle had made it that way. He'd helped her through it all, the counseling and the court dates, being a friend, a confidant, anything she'd needed.

Esme came to love the young surgeon and his nephew, Edward, better. Carlisle had moved to America for medical school. The year her finished, Edward's parents, Carlisle's sister and her husband, had died in a pandemic. Edward had been lucky enough to make it through. After Carlisle finished medical school and established a home for himself in Ashland, Wisconsin, Edward had come to live with him. He'd been only ten at the time. When Esme had met Edward, he was thirteen, a moody teenager, fueled by loss and hormones. The passing away of his parents had still been fresh in his heart. But slowly, Edward opened up to Esme. They shared a common struggle, hurt in the death of a loved one.

A year after Esme's failed suicide attempt, Carlisle took her on a walk through the trees behind his Ashland house. They meandered down the trail, hand in hand, as the sun set through the trees. The rays made Carlisle's blond hair an even deeper gold color and glinted beautifully off his sky blue eyes. Esme marveled for what felt like the hundredth time since she'd opened her eyes that day a year before, at how handsome Carlisle was. And as he knelt on one knee before her and held out a little, black velvet box, Esme's breath caught once more in her throat and she was again at a loss for words. All she could manage was a croaked, "Yes."

Esme stepped back, pulling her sweater tighter around her shoulders as she looked over the ornaments. Each was unique, describing something or someone. There was Edward's piano, next to the small framed picture of his parents. Esme could see her own ornament, a rose-tinted glass heart that hung delicately among the pine boughs. Carlisle had picked it out to describe her. Esme touched the small dove figurine that was her choice for him. Hope. He had brought her hope when she thought life was not worth living.

Edward's footsteps sounded on the hardwood floor behind her. He stopped just at her back, looking at the tree as well.

"Esme?" he said softly.

Esme turned to face the boy who'd become her son in all but blood. He'd been the same height as her when they'd first met, but that hadn't stayed that way for long. He'd quickly surpassed her and now he towered over her, tall like Carlisle. He'd grown from the gangly teenage boy to a handsome young man. His bronze hair and green eyes he'd inherited from his mother, but Carlisle claimed he looked like his father in build and facial structure. Esme wasn't so sure, though. Esme could see the resemblance between uncle and nephew, even if they couldn't. Something about the curve of his jaw and the line of his brow was familiar, particularly when he copied the mannerisms of his uncle, as he was doing now. He looked down at her with concern, his eyebrows knitted, his forehead wrinkled.

"Are you okay?" he asked her. He knew her too well. He knew how Carlisle's long shifts affected her. And he knew that it would be particularly hard this time, Christmas Eve in a brand-new house.

"I'll be fine, Edward," she said softly, giving him a gentle hug. She had to stand on her tiptoes to place a light kiss on his cheek.

"He'll be home soon," she assured him. But her words were more for her benefit, than Edward's.

* * *

"Dr. Cullen!"

Carlisle turned as he heard Dr. Wood, the Chief of Medicine, call him. He sighed as the older man walked towards him down the busy hospital corridor. It was Christmas Eve and snowing and accidents were coming in left, right, and center. Carlisle had just finished surgery with one such crash victim, reconstructing most of his left leg after it'd been crushed by a collision with a tree. He was heading for the locker room to change out of his scrubs and head home. His shift was over and he was eager to get home to his wife and nephew.

"Dr. Cullen, I need you to stay another shift," Dr. Wood said.

Carlisle's heart fell. "Sir, it's Christmas Eve. My wife and nephew—"

"I know, I'm sorry," Dr. Wood replied. "But Dr. Appleby can't make it in the snow. He's stuck on the road."

Carlisle sighed again. Dr. Appleby was his replacement. He was to take over surgeries when Carlisle's shift ended. But if Appleby couldn't get in, then Carlisle would have to remain. He'd have no choice. With so many accidents and the regular holiday incidents coming in, the hospital couldn't be short a surgeon.

"Yes, sir," Carlisle replied, resigned.

"Take twenty minutes, son," Dr. Wood advised him, obviously seeing the haggardness in his face. "Get a bit of shut eye or something. I can't have you dead on your feet at the operating table."

Carlisle nodded and left Dr. Wood, heading for the break room. _I'm sorry, Esme_, he thought. This was their first Christmas in Rochester. That was the only reason he was working Christmas Eve in the first place. He was the new guy. The only veterans were those like Dr. Wood, happily married to the hospital, or Dr. Appleby, looking to get out of seeing his in-laws this year.

Carlisle shrugged out of his lab coat, laying it on the back of the old couch and sitting down. The break room was barren. Not a single item brought any sort of comfort to the room. The walls were industrial white, the floors scuffed linoleum, the furniture old and used and huddled under a tiny tube TV/VCR system that was hanging in the corner. Carlisle pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, dialing the new house number.

_He called her on the road_

_From a lonely cold hotel room_

_Just to hear her say I love you one more time._

"Hello?" came the musical voice of his wife through the earpiece.

"Esme," he said, "It's me."

"Carlisle." He loved the way she breathed his name, her voice full of joy. She made it sound a hundred times better.

"Hello, love," he said softly. "How are you?"

"Better now," Esme replied.

"Is that Carlisle?" he heard Edward ask in the background.

"Yes," Esme told him.

"Can I talk to him?" Carlisle asked.

"Sure, hold on." There was some soft shuffling as she handed off the handset to Edward and a click as Edward's voice came through the speaker.

"Carlisle, when are you coming home?" Carlisle's heart ached as he heard the need in Edward's voice. This wasn't the first time Carlisle had been forced to spend Christmas away from the boy, but it still wasn't as if Carlisle made a habit of it. Edward wasn't any more used to it than Esme was.

_I'm already there_

_Take a look around_

_I'm the sunshine in your hair_

_I'm the shadow on the ground_

_I'm the whisper in the wind_

_I'm your imaginary friend_

_And I know I'm in your prayers_

_Oh I'm already there._

"I can't, Edward," Carlisle replied, the words biting his throat. "The next shift can't get in because of the snow and it's too busy here. I have to stay."

"Oh," was Edward's reply. Carlisle could hear the disappointment in his voice and it pained him. He wanted to be home with his family, not in this pale, sterile maze of corridors and sick rooms with its never-ending routine of pain and suffering and dying.

"I'm sorry, Edward," he apologized.

"It's alright," Edward reassured him, though there was no conviction in his tone. "Here's Esme again."

The phone shuffled hands again and Carlisle heard Esme's voice again.

"Carlisle?"

"I'm still here, angel," he told her.

"What's wrong? Edward…"

"He'll be okay," Carlisle promised her. Edward always was. He was strong like his mother, Carlisle's sister, had been. Carlisle had kicked himself over and over again for not being there when they had taken ill. For being at Harvard Medical School, an ocean away. Carlisle knew he couldn't have done anything to prevent it. Even if he had been on-call in the hospital they'd taken them to, he couldn't have done anything. They wouldn't have let him tend any of them, _because_ Elizabeth was his sister and Edward was his nephew.

"I really miss you, darling," Esme told him.

"I miss you too," he replied. "I'm sorry. The next shift can't get in because of the snow. I have to stay here."

"Carlisle," she choked. He could hear the distress in her voice and it made him feel all the worse.

"I know, Esme," he said soothingly.

_Wish I was in your arms_

_Lying right there beside you_

_But I know that I'll be in your dreams tonight_

"I wish I could be there," he said. "I wish I could hold you close, hold you in my arms, look into your warm, brown eyes, kiss your perfect lips." Esme could hear the longing in his voice.

_And I'll gently kiss your lips_

_Touch you with my fingertips_

_So turn out the lights and close your eyes_

He imagined the feel of his arms around her, the warmth of her body against his, holding her close, his lips on her cheek, her neck, her own mouth.

"You know, no matter what happens, you're always on my mind. I love you, my beautiful angel."

"I love you too, Carlisle," Esme almost whispered into the receiver. "Be careful."

"I always am," he replied gently. He rubbed his tired eyes and ran his hand through his hair. He could picture her, holding the handset, standing in front of the tree. It would be decorated already. All but the star. That was his job.

* * *

"Come home safely," she urged. "I'll be waiting for you."

There was a pause on the other end of the line. "Can you close your eyes for me, love?" he asked her.

"Yes," Esme said softly. She lowered her lids, closing them against the lights of the tree, the flickering fire, the soft silver of the moonlight as it glinted off the fresh snow outside.

"I'm already there. Don't make a sound. I'm the beat of your heart. I'm the moonlight shining down. I'm the whisper in the wind and I'll be there 'til the end. Can you feel the love that we share? I'm already there."

Esme listened to his words in earnest, drinking them in and holding them in her heart for when they came face to face again.

"Esme, I'll be with you wherever you are," he promised her.

"I know. I love you, Carlisle."

"I love you my sweet angel," he replied. "I'll be home before you know it."

Esme smiled. "You already are," she replied.

_I'm already there_

_Take a look around_

_I'm the sunshine in your hair_

_I'm the shadow on the ground_

_I'm the whisper in the wind_

_And I'll be there 'til the end_

_Can you feel the love that we share?_

_Oh I'm already there…_

Esme hung up the phone and turned back to the table. She picked up the gold star, cradling it in her hands again.

_Oh I'm already…_

_There._

**A/N2: I hoped you liked this present. It's been in my head for a week now, ever since I heard this song on the radio. I hadn't heard it in a while and I just couldn't resist a little Christmas story between my favorite Twilight couple. **

**If you liked this, please feel free to review. What did you like about it? What was your favorite part? What would you change about it?**

**Again, Happy Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanzaa, and whatever else!**

**-Wish**


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